Bernard Law's Harvard Days -- IV

I kept reflecting on what happened to the Harvard Catholic Club in the early 1950s after yesterday's post. I'm old enough to remember warnings that were common at that time from figures like J Edgar Hoover that Stalinist groups could take over moribund community organizations and remake them as organs to promote their own agenda, and it's hard to avoid thinking something like that happened at Harvard.

By the time of the Gueguen history, the early 1950s, the Catholic Club was occupied mostly in recruiting for The Work, and it's plain that the only recruits were male, with the goal of moving them into the new Opus Dei center, Trimount House. We must assume the culture there would have been consistent with other Opus Dei centers, with strict segregation of the sexes (if women were there at all other than as housekeepers) and a misogynistic atmosphere.

Presumably this phase ended, and the Harvard Catholic Club is now called the Harvard Catholic Center, "to better represent the entire University Catholic community".

This does raise the question of what the appeal of Catholicism actually was for Bernard Law as an undergraduate. The authorized biography, Boston's Cardinal: Bernard Law, the Man and His Witness, mentions a letter home in his freshman year that "remarked of a freshman smoker that included 'night club' acts: 'It really was incongruous to have this disgustingly base entertainment in a building that once served as a Church.'" (p xviii)

Yet we've already seen that he was in Adams House, where the Harvard Crimson said in 1949, the same year as Law's complaint, that residents

wear their share of dirty white shoes and striped ties, and drink brandy or sherry freely. The house’s dignified yet comfortable atmosphere is well-suited to impress a date.

Other histories of Adams House note that multiple entries allowed residents to avoid curfew or parietal hours, a positive feature, and to wear a bathing suit in the house swimming pool was "not done". Other activities included campy formal readings of Winnie the Pooh. Er, if any of this bothered Law at the time, couldn't he have moved out? Instead, he was there all four years.

My informant has provided what I think is a very credible suggestion on who the "angel" was who helped Law get into Harvard -- again, I'm skeptical that he could have made it in purely as a walk-on. A very good candidate for helping Law would be William Henry Hastie:

In the early 1930s William H. Hastie worked first as a race relations advisor to the Roosevelt administration, and then in 1933 became assistant solicitor of the Department of the Interior.

In 1937 Hastie became the first African-American federal judge when President Roosevelt appointed him to the bench of the Federal District Court in the Virgin Islands.

. . . Between 1946 and 1949 Hastie returned to the Virgin Islands, this time as its first African-American governor. Then in 1949 he was appointed to the Third United States Circuit Court of Appeals, the highest judicial position attained by an African American to that time.

Hastie, a Harvard Law School graduate, would have been a member of the Democrat Establishment. As governor of the Virgin Islands, he had apparently already appointed Law's father to be head of the islands' development authority, so he had a history of doing favors for the family.

It's also possible that Bernard Aloysius Law by this time was double- or even triple-dipping, collecting a likely generous salary as head of the development authority, continuing to receive Air Force pay or a pension after 1950, and potentially receiving pay for intelligence work beyond that. This in fact could have sustained young Bernard Francis at Adams House.